


the world after it ended (and when it begins again)

by rebellamy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-10-10 19:50:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10446084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebellamy/pseuds/rebellamy
Summary: Everything stopped making sense six months ago. Nothing mattered anymore except staying alive.You find your people, and you stick with them, until the bitter end.





	1. keith

**Author's Note:**

> nobody asked for this but I like voltron and i like zombies so this was born. enjoy?

Its peaceful here. It’s quiet here. It’s warm, and it’s sunny here. The water is rippling in the pond and the mosquitos are biting at his skin. It reminds him that parts of the world are still alive; he’s still alive. 

It has been exactly five days since Keith and Shiro were separated. It feels like it could have been longer, but it was easy for Keith to count the sunrises, since he hasn’t been sleeping. All his limbs feel like they’re filled with lead and he’s almost certain he couldn’t lift his sword if he tried. 

After his skin starts to feel like leather, he figures he’d better fill his canteen and head off to look for a decent shelter. He knows he can’t go on much longer without sleeping, but he certainly can’t sleep out here. It’d be suicide. 

Days are easier to mark than hours. It’s summer, so the blistering heat rages on well until six in the afternoon, and he has no idea how long he walks until he reaches an abandoned liquor store. The neon is still flickering, and the windows are busted, and the only other place that looks worthy of scavenging is a gas station, but he knows where his priorities are at: booze, then maybe a stale snack if he’s lucky. 

Strangely enough, the door is locked, so Keith is forced to take his chances with the busted window in the storefront. The glass only catches his pants leg by a bit, but he’s able to climb through without getting scuffed up. Initially, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything left. He should have figured as much. The world ended like six months ago, most anything that was worth taking has been taken by now. After looking around for a while though, he finds a bottle of scotch discarded behind a shelf. He’s never been a scotch kind of guy, but he puts it in his knapsack anyway. It’s the end of the world, he can learn to like scotch. 

He loiters there for a while, checking to see if he can find anything else useful. He stumbles across a couple strips of cloth and a few nails. He’s not sure what he would use the nails for, but he keeps them anyway. It’s nice to have belongings, even if they don’t have a specific purpose. 

In the gas station, he finds some week old potato chips and some questionable beef jerky, and a few other things he decides to save for later. There’s a break room towards the back of the store that looked as though it used to be able to lock, but the knob was broken. There was a really lumpy couch in the corner, and Keith felt himself overflow with gratitude that no one had taken it. He figured he could set up base here for a little while if he needed to. 

He settled in and laid out his luxurious meal of stolen booze and stale chips and jerky. 

Eating almost felt like a chore. His stomach felt like it was shrinking from how long it had been since his last meal. He had always heard that when you’re hungry enough, anything will taste delicious, but the beef jerky was well past it’s prime and it wasn’t even name brand. Pitty it was all he had to keep himself alive. 

After finishing, he took a few swigs of the terrible scotch he found in attempt to make himself tired enough to get him through the night. He could use the sleep, but it would be hard to get any if he stayed sober. 

He made sure to take a few sips of water from his canteen, too, to keep from dehydrating. He may not have finished high school, but he wasn’t an idiot. 

Despite being incredibly sleep deprived, he couldn’t seem to get comfortable on the beat up couch. He was pretty sure there were bugs living in it too, but he couldn’t think about that in that moment. 

He stared at the ceiling for a long time. He tried not to think about the incident on the road, but it had been all he could think about since it happened. 

There were too many of the dead surrounding them. There had to be at least a hundred of them, moaning and groaning, hungry. 

It had just been him and Shiro at the beginning, when everything went to hell. They had been out on a routine raid, looting abandoned cars for anything useful that they could get their hands on. Neither of them had been paying much attention- it had been pretty quiet for a few days. They were a good twenty yards between the car Keith was in, and the one Shiro was in when the dead started to flow in by the dozen. 

It all seemed like a blur when it happened. But Keith remembers every gory detail. He remembers the sound of cracking skulls as his sword made contact. He remembers thinking that they used to be people. People with families. People with lives. He remembers calling out to Shiro, and the ringing that started in his ears when he didn’t hear anything back but grunts and more dead bodies groaning. He remembers the tightness in his lungs, the tears clouding his eyes, the blood on his skin, the pounding in his head. It all happened so fast. And more than anything he remembers Shiro telling him to run. 

His stomach churns at the memory of it. 

He hates thinking like this, but he doesn’t even know if Shiro made it out, and that hurts worse than anything. 

After a restless hour or so, he finally starts to feel the scotch do the trick, and his eyes start to get heavy. He only hoped he wouldn’t dream. 

He’s not sure how long he sleeps, but it had to be a long time. He had to have slept hard, because when he wakes, his face is wet and there are three people in the room he does not recognize, standing over his body with worried looks on their faces.


	2. lance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been a million years since I've updated this! I kind of lost inspiration for it and only just now got back around to writing it. Hopefully I continue to stay motivated and finish this fic out. I'm really liking where it's going so far! Let me know what you think!

It was the hottest part of summer, and they were out of water. 

They were always careful to ration, but it had been so hot that even that was starting to prove to be a difficult task. 

It had been six months of living in the cramped interior of Pidge’s fathers RV. Two months without their father and brother. 

Lance could tell that it was hard on them, but they didn’t talk about it that much. Lance could sympathize, it was never easy to lose people, especially at the end of the world. 

They weren’t dead, Lance could feel it. And he hoped Pidge could feel it too. 

It was hard to leave the RV anywhere without fear of it getting stolen. It was more than just a shelter at this point, it was their home. It was all Pidge had left of their family. But that had to leave it this time, because next to being out of water, unfortunately, they were also out of gas. 

If there were four of them, two would have stayed behind, but since there were only three, all of them had to go out in search of more water. 

“How are we on amo?” Lance asked, slinging his gun over his shoulder. He didn’t really use it that often, because loud noises tended to attract more of the dead, but it was good to have one just in case. And Lance considered himself a pretty good shot. 

“We’ve got two cases left, couldn’t hurt to stock up but these should get us by for at least another month or so,” Hunk replied, packing said cases into a knapsack and throwing it over his shoulder. 

“I saw a service station a couple miles up the road,” Pidge pointed out, sorting through their pack. “I’m willing to bet there's water there, and we might even be able to siphon some gas if we’re lucky. There should be a hose in the RV somewhere we could use.” 

Hunk turned to go rummage through the storage cabinet to look for said hose. 

Lance admired Pidge for their practicality. He was really glad to have them around. 

The road was fairly empty, save a few abandoned cars and lots of unruly grass. The sun was blinding, and Lance didn’t think he had ever been thirstier in his life. He never minded the outdoors, he was actually pretty fond of them. But all this was starting to make him really miss air conditioning. 

“What do you miss most?” Hunk asks, trying his best to take their minds off of the scorching heat. “About before?” 

“Definitely shitty fair food,” Lance chimed in, hoping that he could keep the conversation light enough as to not dampen anyone’s spirits. Namely Pidge’s, he knew they were having a hard time about their brother and father being gone. “What I wouldn’t give for a hot footlong corn dog right about now.”

“Video games,” Pidge added, speaking wistfully. 

“I miss naps,” Hunk observed, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “There’s no time anymore, what with the world trying to kill us and all.” 

Lance almost chuckled, but he couldn’t really bring himself too. He missed the way it used to be, too, but there was almost no point in reminiscing, because things were never going to be like that again. He would probably never see his family again, they would never go back to school, they would never get to feel young again. They were stuck here, they might as well make the best of it. 

“At least we’ve still got each other,” Lance said, feeling incredibly cliche in his choice of words. 

“Since when are you the motivational guy?” Pidge chuckled. It made Lance feel a little bit better. 

“C’mon Pidge, motivation is my middle name. I could have my own TED talk about how motivational I am.” 

“I miss those too,” hunk laughed, and it didn’t hurt lance’s heart as much as their previous conversation. 

Their conversation did help pass the time, because soon they find themselves in front of the service station Pidge had mentioned. 

The place was mostly empty, most of the shelves stripped of anything that they would have found useful, some of them covered in dust. There’s a door that leads behind the freezer shelves, Lance pries it open and steps inside. 

The floor in the room was damp, and it was dark from the lack of windows. The only light in the room was from the outside of the freezer doors. 

Surprisingly, it seemed as though nobody had thought to check in the back for supplies; after a few moments of looking around, Lance stumbled across a crate full of plastic water bottles, enough to keep him, Hunk, and Pidge hydrated for another two weeks at most. It was something. 

“Guys, there’s like a whole crate of water in here. Come help me carry it!” Lance called, looking around to see if there were a dolly or anything to help them get all the water back to the RV. 

There wasn’t a dolly, but there were a couple boxes that he was able to separate the water into so they would be lighter and easier for him and Hunk to carry. 

“Did you find anything else useful back there?” Pidge asked, proudly displaying the container they had found for filling with gasoline. 

“Some box cutters,” Lance replied, holding out the blades that were encased in bright neon yellow plastic. “Not sure how useful they’ll be to us, but it couldn’t hurt to keep them around just in case we need more shorthand defense on short notice.” 

Pidge nodded in agreement. “I’m gonna head outside and put this hose to use and hopefully get us some gas. Yell if you need me,” they said, turning to head out the front of the store towards the gas pumps. Lance hoped nobody else had drained them first. 

Lance figured he would survey the rest of the store to see if they missed anything, but he barely had time to turn around before Hunk called his attention elsewhere. 

“Lance, you might want to come see this.” 

He followed Hunk’s voice to where it’s coming from behind the counter. His friend is peering behind a door that is slightly ajar, looking particularly concerned, only moving aside when Lance tapped on his shoulder. 

Inside the room was a dark haired boy who couldn’t have been any older than him and hunk, draped across an atrocious looking couch, a bottle of whisky dangling from his finger tips. 

“Do you think he’s dead?” Hunk asked, but Lance didn’t humor him. There was no way to tell how long he had been there, but if he were dead, he certainly would have turned by now. 

“Should we wake him?” Lance asked, turning back to glance at Hunk, who gave him a shrug. 

“I don’t know Lance, the guy could be a murderer for all we know. Maybe that’s why he’s all alone.” 

Lance mulled it over for a second. “Oh, relax, Hunk. Who knows, maybe we could use a guy like him on our side if things get sticky.” 

“I think we should wake him up. Maybe he knows something,” Pidge suggested, appearing behind them suddenly. 

Lance knew what Pidge was thinking; that maybe this guy had crossed paths with their brother and father. Lance didn’t think it was likely, but he certainly didn’t want to say anything that would upset them or cause them to lose hope. 

“Maybe you’re right, Pidge,” Lance agreed, turning back to Hunk once more. “What do you say, man?” 

“I guess,” Hunk sighed. “But if this backfires, I want no part of it.” 

Lance grabbed one of the bottles of water out of the boxes he’d set on the counter and unscrewed the lid, carefully stepping further inside the room where the other boy was passed out. 

“Dude, you’re not going to throw water on him, are you?” 

“How else am I supposed to wake him up from a distance?” Lance scoffed, proceeding to toss a generous amount of water across the sleeping boy’s face. 

Almost three minutes pass before the boy sputters himself awake, looking around at the three of them, his brows furrowed with confusion. 

“Welcome back,” Lance announced, a cheeky grin covering his face. Even if the world had ended, Lance still held onto his charm. “Unfortunately, this isn’t heaven, and no, I’m not an angel, though I see where you’d get confused.” 

Something about the quirk of the other boy’s eyebrow at his comment made Lance feel as though this meeting was meant to happen.

**Author's Note:**

> i'll try and have another chapter up as soon as possible. comments and kudos are greatly appreciated! especially comments tbh.


End file.
